THE co-pilot of missing Malaysia Airlines plane made a desperate call from his mobile phone moments before the jet went off the radar.
The call from co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid’s phone ended abruptly, but not before contact was established with a telecommunications sub-station in Penang state, the New Straits Times reports.
The call was made as the jet was flying low near Penang island on Malaysia’s west coast, the morning it went missing.
“The telco’s (telecommunications company’s) tower established the call that he was trying to make. On why the call was cut off, it was likely because the aircraft was fast moving away from the tower and had not come under the coverage of the next one,” the paper said, citing unnamed sources.
It is unknown who he was trying to call as sources would not release more information.
Investigators are still trying to work out what had happened moments before the Boeing 777 went off the radar.
His last communication through WhatsApp was logged at 11.30pm on March 7, just before he boarded the jet for his six-hour flight to Beijing.
The paper said checks on the co-pilot’s phone history showed the last person he spoke to was “one of his regular contacts (a number that frequently appears on his outgoing phone logs)”. This call was made no more than two hours before the flight took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
Checks on his phone showed that connection to the phone had been “detached” before the plane took off. “This is usually the result of the phone being switched off. At one point, however, when the airplane was airborne, between waypoint Igari and the spot near Penang (just before it went missing from radar), the line was ‘reattached’.
“A ‘reattachment’ does not necessarily mean that a call was made. It can also be the result of the phone being switched on again,” the sources said. He and Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah have come under intense scrutiny after the plane mysteriously vanished.
NEW SEARCH STRATEGY
The search for Malaysia Airlines MH370 will likely require a new strategy this week after no wreckage has been sighted and the plane’s two black boxes appear dead.
The reluctance to send the automated underwater vehicle Bluefin 21 down to search is based on uncertainty of the precise location of black boxes, though Tony Abbott and search spokesman Angus Houston are certain of the general area.
No word has come yet of a new plan but the lack of any visual sighting of the wreckage will call into question the value of sending planes to scour an area that has now been thoroughly searched.
Nine military and one civilian plane were out again yesterday, as 14 ships ploughed seas 2331km north-west of Perth.
The search is concentrated on an area of 41,393 square kilometres, a massively refined area from a fortnight ago, yet still the search fails to yield absolute confirmation of the wreckage.
Two strong and sustained man-made frequency transmissions were detected by Australian Defence vessel Ocean Shield’s towed pinger locator last Saturday. They were relocated on Tuesday but the signals were much weaker.
The Bluefin 21 moves at a walking pace and does not have strong detection capabilities. It will be best deployed upon receiving a firm location, but chances of that have dwindled.
PM ABBOTT IN CHINA
Prime Minister Abbott is very confident searchers know one of the plane’s black box location to “within some kilometres”, though he did not specify an exact distance.
Speaking from Beijing, Mr Abbott said: “While we do have a high degree of confidence that the transmissions are from MH370s recorder, no-one should underestimate the difficulty of the task ahead of us,” the PM said.
“Yes we have narrowed down the search area … but trying to locate anything 4.5km beneath the surface of the ocean … is a massive, massive task and it is likely to continue for a long time to come.”
He said search teams would continue to conduct sonar tests to narrow the search area further.
“Given that the signal is now fading we are trying to get as many signals as possible so we can narrow the (search) area,” he said.
“Once that has been done it is our intention to then deploy the submersible to conduct a sonar search of the sea bed and then, based on the sonar search, attempt to get a visual of the base of the sea bed.”
The PM gave Chinese President Xi Jinping a private and detailed briefing in Beijing about the latest on the search for the missing Boeing 777-200ER aircraft which had 154 Chinese people on board.
The Ocean Shield will continue making sweeps of the likely area. It will work alone to avoid noise interference from other ships, which could give false readings.
MH370 disappeared on March 8 en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, with 239
people on board.
Analysis of the plane’s six hourly “handshakes”, and a seventh unusual broken handshake, put the plane’s likely location in the current search area.
This appeared to have been further confirmed by the underwater transmissions, which have since gone silent.
SCAMMERS TARGET RELATIVES
Scammers are targeting relatives of those aboard missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370.
A bogus email has been sent to the families of missing passengers suggesting compensation claims are possible even though the aircraft hasn’t yet been found.
“At a minimum, an international aviation treaty allows the next-of-kin of the plane’s MH370 passengers to seek up to US$175,000 equivalent in your local currency,” it says.
This purports to come from Allen Helter of Malaysia Airlines and urges those claiming to contact Mohamed Bin Abd Wahab of the Eon Bank in Kuala Lumpur.
However, the email originates from a Yahoo account in Hong Kong. It appears to be a standard advance fee fraud, with those seeking compensation first required to pay administrative charges before funds can be released.
source: news.com.au
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